 I
have noticed that as I get older my ambition to wrestle with gargantuan
projects for hours on end has dwindled. I was working on a long-overdue
bathroom renovation in our house one winter when I spotted just the diversion
I needed. It was paint mixer that I had made many years before.
No, not the stick of wood that they give you a bunch of at the paint counter,
but a simple 1/4" piece of steel rod with a small strip of sheet metal
welded to the bottom, corners upturned like a propeller. I would
use it on a drill to mix paint to a uniform consistency. But failure
to rinse it off each time I used it had turned it into a lumpy, bumpy implement
that looked like it came out of the movie “Alien”. The propeller
edges were scarcely visible. "Can't have that" I thought, and waltzed
off into the garage to clean it up, leaving the piles of tools and drywall
compound dust behind in the bathroom.
At my workbench in the garage, I grabbed the propane torch head and spun a gas cylinder on to it. I hit the peizioelectric starter button and the flame shot out with a “whoosh” like a jet engine. I had just bought that torch last year. Tools and fire, "Yeah!, this sure beats sanding walls" I thought. I picked up a metal putty knife and gently heated the mixer shaft well away from the flame. When I saw the outermost layer of gray paint blister a bit, I set one end down on the bench and scraped the knife down the length of the shank. A big thick layer of 8 years of home improvement projects peeled off and curled on to the top of the workbench. It was like a slice of a poorly coordinated rainbow. Layers of paint, probably over an eighth of an inch thick. Grays, greens, lavenders, rose, and peach. And I knew every one of them. It was like looking back in time. Now I won't tell you that the room got all fuzzy and harp music started playing or anything. But I held the shank closer to my eyes, and did reminisce a bit. Clearly "Seagull Grey" was the dominant color. It was the color of our house. A year or so after I spent the better part of a summer painting our two story home, a friend told me about his painting strategy. He said he painted one side of his house every year. That way it was never that overwhelming. In theory, it seemed like a good idea. I tried it. I kept up the first two years, painting the ends of the house. Then, daunted by the sheer magnitude of the front of the house, and the fact that the paint was only three years old, I blew it off for a year. The next year I painted the front, but the following two years I found some excuse for not picking up the brush and getting to work on the back. But I had gone through probably a half dozen buckets of “Seagull Gray”, and it had left its mark on the old paint mixer. Interspersed between a couple layers of the gray was a light peach. The kitchen. I remember my wife wanting to re-do the whole kitchen and wanting a stenciled border along the ceiling. I think she actually painted most of the kitchen herself. A month later she bought the stencil kit, a few weeks after that she bought the paint for it. A month and a half after that stenciling started. Just slightly over a year later, the stencil was completed. It looked nice, but I recalled thinking that the peach color underneath it had faded a bit.
Then there was another shade of gray, called
"battleship" gray. I distinctly remember moving at least 5 gallons
of it from the house we rented prior to buying the house that the “layers”
were telling the story of. I found it at a local department store,
waaayy back in the back corner of the store, on a "Clearance" shelf.
It was $1 a gallon. I brought it home and my wife saw it in the garage.
"What is that paint for?" she asked. "I don't know, but it was cheap.
A DOLLAR a gallon!!"
"Yeah, but what is it for?"
Near the bottom of all the layers was the
unmistakable Lavender. Our daughter's room. I remember this room
renovation very well. I learned a hard lesson about raging estrogen
back then. I remember being given a deadline, hard and fast, to complete
some furniture moving and shelving teardown (the room was being used as
an office prior) by a date 2 weeks or earlier before our daughters due
date. I didn't see what the big deal was. "I'll get to it when
I get to it" I said. I had already "suggested" that my wife do the
painting to burn off some hyperactive "nesting" energy. I was warned
sternly one evening that the shelving removal deadline was only a day away
and failure to meet it meant that our daughter might be scarred for life
by having to come home to a room that didn't look like Martha Stewart herself
had just left it the day before. Fact is, I had totally forgotten
about it until I came home from work and caught a whiff of the faint smell
of fresh latex paint as I came through the door form the garage.
“Uh oh” I thought. I slowly walked upstairs and stared into a cool lavender
room right out of Alice in Wonderland. My wife was rolling paint
in the very last corner.
"Where'd the shelves go?" I asked, looking hard for evidence of the heavy plastic anchors along the right wall and seeing none.I was nothing short of stunned. This was a woman who would come and get me out in the yard on a Saturday to get a battery cover of a talking robot toy for the kids. Not to undermine her abilities, but the second drawer down under the work bench might just as well have contained body parts for all she knew. I didn't even ask about how the holes were filled. I think she probably collected some rocks along the driveway and ground them into a paste with a pair of nail clippers. At the very bottom of the thick multi layer
paint was a medium green. It was the accent color that was used in
the basement on the baseboards and trim when I finished it off into a playroom
and office probably 7 years before. I knew this color well as I had
recently had to go find it again. While away on a business trip last
year, it seems that our curious 5 year old daughter had recently discovered,
in a moment of boredom, a can of paint (a gallon, nearly full) at the top
of the basement stairs. A can of paint that my wife hadn't bothered
to hammer the lid down on to tightly. No, it wasn't green, it was
actually a blue that was absent from the hardened mixer, cross section
of life. A blue that was very uniformly and somewhat artistically
splashed across the carpet, walls, doors and baseboards at the bottom of
the basement stairs as the lid flew off about halfway down and the can
emptied nearly all it contents before a final elegant bounce of the very
last step. The big Sears wet-dry shop vac had made a reasonable attempt
to clean up the mess, but had really one managed to just lighten the shade
of blue a bit in the big pool on the carpet just beyond the last stair.
After tiring of seeing "Eryn's curiousity gone awry" in powder blue for
many months every time I descended he stairs, I finally attacked it one
weekend. I removed all of the trim and took a small piece to Home
Depot to see if I could get a match. I sanded the walls and repainted
them white, pulled the stair treads up and stripped them with an autobody
sander and 80 grit paper. Occasionally Eryn would appear at the top
of the stairs and watch me toiling away, but when I glanced up at her,
she would slip away quickly. I chuckled a bit, picked up the mixer and held it near the flame again. It seemed a bit wrong to soften, blister and scrape away memories like that, peeling off thick strips of house history and scooping them into the trash can. I wondered why I had neglected to clean the paint of the mixer each time, but for a moment was happy I hadn't. Like rings on a cut tree, each layer had a story behind it and I enjoyed remembering each one. I finished off the mixer on the wire wheel on the bench grinder and the last speck of paint was whisked away. I took the mixer back into the bathroom and used to mix up and old bucket of drywall compound and went back to work. The next day I saw it lying there as I passed
the bathroom on the way out the door to work. I had neglected to
rinse the drywall compound off of it. It was a lumpy, bumpy implement.................
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